


sacrosanct

by kyrilu



Series: Here I Am [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Backstory, Character Study, Harm to Animals, Introspection, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, Prologue, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1524854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things or people that kept Matthew company, and the one thing that he really wanted. (Or, in another light, the thing that he didn't want at all.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	sacrosanct

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place before The Servant Songs but works as a stand-alone.
> 
> Credit owed to drinkbloodlikewine because my Matthew characterization is built on our mutual headcanons. :)

1\. his mother

 

Matthew Brown has never had friends since he was a kid. He knew them, had forced himself to make eye contact and use semi-coherent sentences, trying to avoid words that he might stumble over, but he keeps to himself. He isolates himself, twists the rosary his mother had given him in his hands, and thinks. Always thinking, his head full of the patron saints that his mother taught him and other, darker ones.

He carries his loneliness into his teenage years - he's civil, he's responsible, long limbs and slender and strong, but he is alone.

He's alone except when his mother comes home, exhausted from her two jobs, and reads to him from the small leatherbound Bible that used to be his grandmother's. When Matthew is eighteen, the last year of high school, she doesn't come home.

He memorializes her with black and white roses, a twining abstract design that he drew on paper. She'd always loved Mary, queen of Heaven and Earth, she of the miracle of roses, as she rolled her fingers down the rosary beads and whispered Hail Marys.

He leaves the drawing on her grave, and doesn't wait for the wind to blow it away.

 

2\. his pets

 

There's the neighborhood pets from the adjoining apartments, but those - those - he puts into his lap and sets a match to their fur.

 

3\. his tattoo artist

 

It seems that all the stores around it might close, change hands, or be demolished, but the tattoo parlor a couple blocks away from his old apartment will always remain. It's there before Matthew's time institutionalized, it's there after, and Matthew is welcome to lay out his designs for the owner, and always receives a nod of approval, or a critique on what to change.

He likes it there: the hustle and bustle of people coming in and out, the sound of whirring tools, the occasional sounds of muted pain. And there's his drawings - right there, on the wall, dark lines and swirls, outlines of things.

The owner thinks that he's a good yet uptight kid, even after being in, and she doesn't peg him as someone who would get a tat.

But one day, he shows her a new design of his and asks if she could ink it for him. She tells him yes. He doesn't flinch when the needle breaks skin.

She asks him, "What is it?" because it's starting small, one pattern at a time, parts of a whole. He looks at her with a playful turn of his mouth and says, "You'll see when it's done."

 

4\. his dreams

 

He wants to know. The most that he wants from himself is to understand what this is in his veins: this gap in humanity, pschopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, whatever anyone wanted to call it. He does not care like the others do.

The people like him seem to prominently pop up in two places, when it comes to news: in business or in murder. He picks the second, the obvious choice, but mired in thoughts that are organized and careful as if they were for the former.

He dreams of blood every night. He has the M.O.s and the crimes and the victims of his predecessors in his head, which he carries and holds for a while tasting for their sanctity, and then banishes with the pull of his mother's rosary beads.

 

4\. his cellmate

 

Not strictly his cellmate, because there was only one patient allowed per cell, but a neighbor. His name is Theo, which means God, but it's not very fitting. He's not very good with his Bible verses when he stumbles through them, relying on memory, and some stupid mistakes make Matthew frown. It sounds like he's working from King James's Bible in his memory, couched in archaic thees and thines. Matthew's used to using his mother's Catholic translation.

But he ends up falling asleep anyway, his arms under his head under the rough pillow. Theo's voice is nothing like his mother's, but when he goes at the psalms, it's as if he's singing.

 

5\. his fires

 

Fires are supposed to mean death. Human instinct is to back away. It's hot and it can hurt.

Yet he catches himself wondering what would happen if he tilted a candle just so onto the cloth on the altar.

Hannibal Lecter collects stories about church roofs collapsing. He was also raised Roman Catholic, once upon a time, but in Lithuania, and he's also quite the artist himself. It's really not so different: the desire to mix in the things that they were told were holy with the things that they were told were sinful. They want to find the beauty in between.

 

+1.

 

There is one acquaintance, later, after all. Matthew Brown and the bailiff Andrew Sykes find themselves eating lunch on the courthouse stairs, underneath the statues of creatures of justice. They trade stories about murderers and criminals and bloody things - their work and their interests (but not Sykes' pursuits, unlike Matthew). Sometimes when they have to restrain a disturbed patient, their hands brush, and Sykes will look startled, flustered.

"Andy," Matthew calls him, and pretends not to notice how Sykes' eyes warm at the sight of him. It's...different. Lying in the shadows of angels, pondering each mad story after the next, Matthew's lisp quietly rasping over the sibilants.

He asks Sykes for the knife.

It's really not personal.

He comes over to Sykes' house - they used to sit on the couch here and watch the news; they used to scratch out diagrams of crime scenes over there on that table, Andy praising Matthew's art skills - with the gun and the antlers ready.

It's for Will Graham.

In the shadow of the trees in the backyard, Matthew watches as his shrine catches aflame. He counts this as the moment when he's broken his isolation: seeking Will Graham. Seeking a place to land.


End file.
